r with a curious sense of emotional excitement. The little
chamber was full of half lights and shadows, and there seemed to him
something almost unearthly about this woman with her soft grey gown
and marble face. He was stirred by her presence in a new way. The
rustle of her silken skirts as she swept in and out of the dim light,
the delicate whiteness of her arms and throat, the flashing of a
single diamond in her dark coiled hair,--these seemed trivial things
enough, yet they were yielding him a new and mysterious pleasure. For
the first time his sense of her beauty was fully aroused. Every now
and then he caught faint glimpses of her face. It was like the face of
a new woman to him. There was some tender and wonderful change there,
which he could not understand, and yet which seemed to strike some
responsive chord in his own emotions. Instinctively he felt that she
was passing into a new phase of life. Surely, he, too, was walking
hand and hand with her through the shadows! The touch of her
interlaced fingers had burned his flesh.

[Illustration: There seemed to him something almost unearthly about
this woman with her soft grey gown and marble face]

Presently she came and sat down beside him.

"Forgive me!" she murmured. "It does me so much good to have you here.
I am very foolish!"

"Tell me about it!"

She frowned very slightly, and looked away at a star.

"It is nothing! It is beginning to seem less than nothing! I have
written a book for women, for the sake of women, because my heart
ached for their sufferings, and because I too have felt the fire. I
wonder whether it was really an evil book," she added, still looking
away from him at that single star in the dark sky. "People say so! The
newspapers say so! Yet it was a true book! I wrote it from my soul,--I
wrote it with my own blood. I have not been a good woman, but I have
been a pure woman! When I wrote it, I was lonely; I have always been
lonely. But I thought, now I shall know what it is like to have
friends. Many women will understand that I have suffered in doing this
thing for their sakes! For it was my own life which I lay bare, my own
life, my own sufferings, my own agony! I thought, they will come to me
and they will thank me for it! I shall have sympathy and I shall have
friends.... And now my book is written, and I am wiser. I know now
that woman does not want her freedom! Though they drag her down into
hell, the chains of her slavery have gr